Overhead and jib cranes that can be driven to move a lifted load in a horizontal direction.
Suggestions have been made for power-driven cranes to move a hoisted load laterally in response to manual effort applied by a worker pushing on the lifted load. A sensing system determines from manual force input by a worker the direction and extent that the load is desired to be moved, and the crane responds to this by driving responsively to move the lifted load to the desired position. Examples of such suggestions include U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,350,075 and 5,850,928 and Japanese Patent JP2018293.
A problem encountered by such systems is a pendulum effect of the lifted load swinging back and forth. For example, when the crane starts moving in a desired direction, the mass of the load momentarily lags behind. It then swings toward the desired direction. A sensing system included in the crane can misinterpret such pendulum swings for worker input force. This can result in the crane driving in one direction, establishing a pendulum swing in the opposite direction, sensing that as a reverse direction indicator, and driving in the opposite direction. This results in a dithering motion. In effect, by misinterpreting pendulum swings as worker input force, the crane can misdirect the load in various ways that are not efficient or ergonomically satisfactory. Prior attempts at arriving at an inventive solution to this problem have focused on suppressing oscillations of the load while the crane is accelerating or decelerating.
We consider swing suppression to be secondary. In our view, it is more important to control the impedance felt by the operator pushing on the hoisted load. Thus, we have developed an inventive solution that uses a control strategy based on estimating the force applied by the operator to the load and, subject to a variable desired load impedance, reacting in response to this estimate. The human pushing force is not measured directly, but it is estimated from angle and position measurements. In effect, our control strategy places the human operator in the outer control loop via an impedance block that is used in making trajectory generalizations.